The Burning of Los Angeles
Looking at photographs and watching video of Los Angeles on fire, I could not help thinking of Nathaniel West's 1939 novel, The Day of the Locust. Everyone who visits this site, has probably read the book at some point in his life. I read it in the early 1960s at the urging of a New York friend, Pat Presti, who also made me read The Catcher in the Rye and Catch 22.
I remembered the book well enough som 20 years ago when I wrote a column, "The Loser in the Lounge Chair." It was based on typical West character, a Midwestern loser who moves to a house in Southern California and sits in a broken lounge chair in the yard. Instead of turning the chair around to gain a magnificent view of a valley, he sits watching a lizard catch flies. While he roots for the flies, he does nothing to stop the lizard. The loser's name is Homer Simpson. Matt Groening, it turns out, had read a book. Interestingly, when Homer, being a Midwesterner, refers to the protagonist as Toddie, Tod responds sarcastically by calling him Homie. (It is also to be noted that Homer is the name of Groening's father.)
The central character, hardly a hero, is young Tod Hackett. Hackett had lost his ambition as an artist and taken a job at a movie studio in Hollywood. The narrator comments that Tod obviously had talent and cited his work in progress as evidence, a painting he called "The Burning of Los Angeles."
The painting is really the scene of the novel, and Tod, infatuated with Faye Greener--the all-American slut of the future--he reflects:
If anyone wants to read a fine modern American novel, this is a good time to pick up "The Day of the Locust." I'd be happy to discuss it.
You can get the book for $.75 on Kindle or free on Project Gutenburg Canada: http://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/westn-dayofthelocust/westn-dayofthelocust-00-e.html
The company that I slave for is experiencing major connection issues so I spent yesterday and today on stand-by with nothing to do. I spent some of that time both days studying and reviewing Greek. Today I thought “Why not?” and began reading this book in the evening.
Abe Kusich is hilarious. What else can one say about him? The characterizations of the women might lead one to believe that West knew a thing or two.
Homer watches the Lizard and flies for almost a month before Harry Greener shows up at his door. That’s hilarious. Who in the world wouldn’t find something better to do, and that’s quite aside from turning the chair for a better view!
The Greeners are unbelievable. They are so fraudulent and fake that they can’t even tell the difference between fake and real any more, switching from fakery to normal behavior seemingly at will, or sometimes without being able to help it. Harry brings W.C Fields’ charlatan characters to mind.
Unfortunately, when the connection issues are fixed we’ll be slammed for several days so I probably won’t be able to follow along in the book until the flood subsides. But it is a fast read and very entertaining so maybe I can catch up after we slow down. I want to finish this book.
It only gets better. At least Harry Greener, though he cannot help doing his old routines, had learned his trade, Fay acts all the time without even suiting her stock gestures and facial expressions to her speech.
I added this quotation above:
” Somewhere farther up the hill a bird began to sing. He listened. At first the low rich music sounded like water dripping on something hollow, the bottom of a silver pot perhaps, then like a stick dragged slowly over the strings of a harp. He lay quietly, listening.
When the bird grew silent, he made an effort to put Faye out of his mind and began to think about the series of cartoons he was making for his canvas of Los Angeles on fire. He was going to show the city burning at high noon, so that the flames would have to compete with the desert sun and thereby appear less fearful, more like bright flags flying from roofs and windows than a terrible holocaust. He wanted the city to have quite a gala air as it burned, to appear almost gay. And the people who set it on fire would be a holiday crowd.
The bird began to sing again. When it stopped, Faye was forgotten and he only wondered if he weren’t exaggerating the importance of the people who come to California to die. Maybe they weren’t really desperate enough to set a single city on fire, let alone the whole country. Maybe they were only the pick of America’s madmen and not at all typical of the rest of the land.
Well I read some more last night and we are still down at work today. I finished the book this morning.
I’ll refrain from making comments from too far ahead in the book since others may just be beginning to read it.
West seems to have had a lot of insight as well as foresight into the American future. That’s especially
evident in a scene later on at Homer’s place, with the boy Andore and his mother. That scene is a little disturbing and eerily prophetic. It’s easy to forget in our current social and cultural predicament that most or all of our current ailments were already there back in the 30’s, some to a lesser degree, some perhaps just beginning, some perhaps already full blown.
One of the odd things about the novel is how contemporary it seems.
AW, it does not appear that anyone else has looked at the novel, so please go ahead and share your thoughts.
Well, I have several paragraphs written up but I lost control of the keyboard cursor and mouse pointer in Firefox browser. The keyboard cursor froze and the pointer disappears when I try to move it into Firefox.
I was finishing up and was just about to post it all. I’ll try to save it somehow but so far no luck. I may have to rewrite it.
The previous message was brought to you courtesy of Chrome in another computer. This is infuriating.
Of course I lost everything. I’ll have to rewrite it
I’m going to do it in installments this time in case I have another disaster.
Tod apparently knows some Greek and so seems to be better educated then everyone else, but he doesn’t seem so wise at least at first. He lets Abe bully him into going to check out the San Burgoo apartments and then rents one because he sees Faye there. That’s not too wise. His fantasies of raping Faye which he cannot carry through with say something about his character as well. He seems to have a little too much decency for his depraved desires toward her.
Faye is the typical manipulative sociopath. She won’t bed down with any man who does not meet certain criteria for looks and wealth, in other words a man she can use and can get something out of. She even tells Tod this and that’s why she won’t have anything to do with him. Yet she goes to bed with a worthless “greaser” who has nothing to offer her. That’s so much like so many worthless women of today.
Then there is Homer, who is stupid and unintelligent, and won’t let himself see the evil in other people, which is why Faye can use him and take him to the cleaners. She abuses him out of shame over what she’s doing to him so she at least has some kind of conscience, but not much. She wrecks him emotionally and he winds up completely disconnected from his surroundings, and when pushed too far by the child Andore, who attacks him at just the wrong time, he descends into criminal violence. This must be a psychological type.
At first I had trouble accepting the movie shown at Mrs Jennings’ place for what it was because I didn’t expect something like that being depicted in a novel from the thirties, but the voice in the back of my mind kept saying, “what do you think it is, you bloody idiot? It’s being screened by a madam in a cat house!” It’s just more out in the open now, and was probably more common in Hollywood than elsewhere.
The song and dance act performed by Andore (the boy with the idiotic name), after being cajoled and threatened into it by his user of a mother is disturbing because of it’s lewdness and is predictive of today’s child beauty pageants, where little girls are dressed up like prostitutes and do suggestive performances on stage. Some people think that such things are “cute” when done by little kids but they are not. They are corrupting, character destroying, and perverse. Shirley Temple may have been the bell weather for this but I don’t think she was made to go that far. I don’t know since I’ve never sat down and watched one of her movies. She grew into a beautiful young woman and aged into an old woman with stupid politics and silly ideas, but we may well predict that Andore will turn out much worse, and indeed we see that he already has when he attacks Homer with the rock.
West’s vivid descriptions of scenery and sounds were sometimes hard to envision in the mind’s eye or the mind’s ear, and that was especially true of sound descriptions, but they may have been because I has suffering from a lot of fatigue when reading most of the book. His description of the Waterloo battle scene and the collapse of the fake hill was as epic as it was, in all probability, realistic. His description of the junk stage props, in a massive graveyard of them, which he says began as dreams in someone’s mind and ended up as discarded junk, is surreal and undoubtedly true.
Early in the book, he mentions the locals dressing up as something they are not, such as secretaries dressing up in and going to work in sailor suits, etc,. Wasn’t this a trend that started there in Hollywood?
Then there are the newcomers, the retirees from outside California who Tod is sure will destroy civilization. Their retirement dreams turned out to be lies, and they don’t know what to do with themselves. So they have their cults, their crazy diets, their lunatic religions, their gurus, and they stare at the locals with hatred. They seem to be the prototype for today’s American in many ways.
The book ends in an anticlimax which caught me off guard. It ended before I realized it was about to end. I was expecting a chapter or two after the mob event.
West seems to have understood crowd psychology and mob mentality quite well. I wonder if he wasn’t caught in the middle of such a mob at some point. In any case he seemed to be losing it at the end.
Tod’s painting turned out not to be accurate in one respect, in that the mob didn’t destroy the city by fire, but that may be irrelevant. Eventually they would destroy it anyway. They were the fire.
I’ve probably forgotten a lot or just didn’t “get” some things, but this novel probably was very realistic when looking at society in Hollywood then, or when applied to American society today.
I meant to say that Tod seemed to be losing at the end, not West. Also that while he was being crushed against a fence by the mob he was finishing his painting in his mind. I’m not sure if that’s genius or lunacy.
Certainly the conflation of picture and mob is a brilliant device. Is Tod perhaps self-deceived in not seeing himself as one of the alienated Middle Americans who has found nothing in LA?
I didn’t catch that. I think so, as he seems to understand their alienation quite well but has failed to turn the critical eye on himself. He is certainly hanging out with some unsavory characters who will sit and watch a smut film with elements of child porn in it, though he doesn’t stay to watch all of it himself. That says something about him all right. What are all his friends doing if not tearing down society? He’s one of them and one of the mob and doesn’t seem realize it.
A sort of technical problem of fiction and drama is the need to move characters around. In the novel, depending on perspective–whether first, multiple, or authorial third person–the author has to find ways of introducing representative characters. Given that Tod is at the center, this means that West must expose him to the objects of his satire. Tod, remember, had hit a dead end in art and is a sort of passive or perhaps passive aggressive character, one step above Homer. He is neither good looking nor brilliant nor virile. He lets things happen and West portrays him as bored by most of the degeneracy around him. Since West was himself something of an unathletic nebbish, he has probably poured a good deal of himself into Tod.
It is not an unfamiliar character type. We can see it in Nick Caraway in Gatsby, for example. The extreme case is Kenneth Patchen’s Shy Pornographer. He is closer to Homer than Tod but writes a Perry Mason novel, completely pure. The publisher spices it up but replacing perfectly innocent passages with asterisks that indicate smut that has been removed. So women go for him. His name is Budd, and when he walks down the street he is confused that so many people seem to known, as in “Hey Bud, can you spare me some change?”
Here again, you’ve brought up something I didn’t catch. I was already doubting that Tod’s inability to carry through with raping Faye was due to a residual decency. I had picked up on his lack of virility but hadn’t considered it. He couldn’t go through with it because of lack of gumption, guts, or virility, however you might want to put it. Perhaps it was also just the boredom. He couldn’t get worked up enough. People who start out excited by degeneracy often grow bored of it in the long run.
I read this book too fast.
Perhaps Tod is in a more advanced state of alienation than anyone else. He doesn’t seem to be amused by the rubber dead horse in the pool. He can’t participate in watching the movie. He can’t even become part of the mob. He’s already past all that.
He’s a bit of a Freudian blank screen or Smith”s impartial spectator. We see LA through his jaded eyes. One thing I admire about West is that he does not, like so many New York Jewish novelists, make his hero a superior wise guy.
In general, I am of the opinion that one should give a serious writer the benefit of the doubt and postpone judgment of characters and actions until the work has been ingested and mulled over. West is clearly a kind of moralist and satirist, though one does not have to agree entirely with his point of view to appreciate either the satire or the story. I have never made up my mind about him. I certainly like him a good deal better than his contemporaries and successors like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, etc. and all the other writers of that ilk.
Agreed. Maybe I’ve been trying to read too much into Tod. I may re-red the book when I have time and take more time with it. I had to get it done fast before the system was back up at work and workflow became a flood tide, which it now is.
West certainly can illustrate scenes. I’m still impressed with the Waterloo scene.
Speaking of Saul Bellow, I always thought of him as a darling of the left and therefore someone to avoid. Maybe that’s too harsh?
Worse, a neocon. He had some talent but bored the pants off me. I met him very briefly and he confirmed my impression of false dignity.
Read about half last night; “people everywhere wearing sports clothes that weren’t really sports clothes” -now that’s rather contemporary; prefab plaster houses and silly buttocks dances too. I think the author points out something significant in his description of Harry: “..he could never express anything either subtly or exactly. They wouldn’t permit degrees of feeling, only the furthest degree.” A very modern characteristic, especially exhibited by those at the center of mass culture today.
Thanks, JJ, for the insights. He also describes Harry later as having a face that has been permanently wrinkled and distorted by his perpetual grimacing. Harry, the dwarf Abe, and Earl Shoob are not only memorable characters in themselves but archetypal progenitors of the people we cannot escape anywhere.
The satire seems comical at first but ends much more cynically. Almost depressing. Maybe that’s just me.
The book probably does need to be read more than once; I found it too easy to read quickly as the narrative and the characters pulled me right along. It does seem like it could have been written today, except for the ubiquity of hats and indoor smoking. Many of the scenes and conversation seemed very natural and believable and like they must have been based on actual experiences. On the way to church yesterday, the whole conversation surrounding the fairy came to mind (where Tod tries to help Homer by mouthing the word “homo”) and made me laugh audibly. The kids were left wondering.
Tod draws distinctions between the tacky masqueraders and the outsiders who come to California to die. The mob at the end comprises the latter and I assume that these give the title of the book. The masqueraders just seem to be part of the terrain: the fakery breeding the outsiders’ contempt and cynicism that finally erupts into the mob. Tod has no reason to think of himself as anything other than one of the outsiders. He is in fact an outsider and he acts just as he describes them in his rape fantasies toward the very fake Faye.
His final description of his painting might hold the clue as to what Tod thinks of himself. Initially, I figured that he has set himself and his associates apart from the mob, like hapless victims deserving sympathy. However, there is nothing sympathetic in the detestable Faye and I doubt that Tod even thinks there is. Her throwing the rock toward the mob might be an act of defiance, but it could be more antagonization – like tapping the glass in a monkey house. She certainly did little else but antagonize the group of main characters to the point of violence. Were any of the main characters actual Californians? They seem more like a small sample of the mob cut away for close inspection.
Thanks, Dom. Yes, the colors of the humor turn rapidly darker. One disturbing thing to bear in mind: West is describing what conservatives look at as Hollywood’s Golden Age, an era of wholesome real American entertainment. They conveniently ignore the alcoholism, obsessive fornication, adultery, illegitimate children, sex orgies, drugs.
In 1939 Ronald Reagan would have been learning the lines for his signature role as George Gipp; it was the year of Stage Coach, Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Mr Smith Goes to Washington. That is how we like to remember “the greatest generation.” As Hemingway’s Jake Barnes would say, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.” Serious novelists and poets offer us a glimpse of reality we would never get from newsreels, newspapers, or official histories. Remember this whenever some Republican tells you to look back to the Golden Age of American culture. Read cummings and Eliot or Hemingway and West.
Last month I started reading the detective novels written by Florentine novelist Marco Vichi. They are set in the early 1960s in Florence. Vichi spends a bit too much time on the cop’s drab private life, his friends, dinners, etc, and I was at first disturbed with his obvious anger and disgust both with the Fascist regime that had been overthrown and with the Liberal Capitalist regime that had taken over. But the more I read, the better I understood his disgust with the Americanization and capitalization of Italian family life, social life, and culture, the tawdriness and vulgarity of a once fine people who were corrupted and vulgarized by greed. When I used to know a lot of Italians, I had interesting conversation with Leftists, both Communists and the troublesome people Lenin used to call “left communists.” They deluded themselves about the USSR and Italian Marxists, but their basic views were pretty sound, both culturally and ethically.
When friends ask me about Trump, I try to explain that, Yes, he is a vulgarian of a very low type, one that would fit in perfectly as a Studio Mogul in West’s Hollywood, the friend of athletes, strippers, rappers and use the phrase Mencken applied quite unfairly to WJ Bryan, “A zany without sense or dignity,” but, Yes, he is the best candidate since Eisenhower (who also could hardly inspire much confidence–the social climbing managerial wearing a uniform he never stained with sweat or risked getting pierced by gunfire). West’s Hollywood IS most probably the highest level of culture and justice to which this nation can aspire.